Prayer Is a Place by Phyllis Tickle

Author:Phyllis Tickle [Tickle, Phyllis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55122-1
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2005-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 30

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The terms applied to any change, be it social, political, religious, or cultural, are often fractious and unwieldy. “Post-Reformation” as a way of naming our time certainly is; but one of the more visible characteristics of post-Reformation religion has an even more ungainly name, that of “postdenominationalism.” Anyone who can say it discovers fairly soon thereafter, though, that in this case the bark is worse than the bite.

Postdenominationalism means, on its largest scale, the shy moving back into dialogue of the Roman Catholic Church, not only with Orthodox communions, but also with many of the larger Protestant ones. When, as happened in 2003, the Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America can sit down in conversation at the Vatican with His Holiness the Pope for the purposes of discussing their joint declaration about the theological balance between faith, works, and grace in the plan of salvation, something more than ecumenism per se has happened.

At only a slightly less global level, when the Episcopal Church in America, which requires apostolic succession in the laying on of hands at ordination, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which scorns both that process and the theology behind it … when they two can enact a statement of “Common Mission” that provides, among other things, that the congregations of either may be completely pastored by the clergy of the other … when that happens, as it did in 2002 after several years of prayerful consultation, then something much more substantial than ecclesial good manners is afoot. At a quieter level, when the Protestant denominations of, for instance, Wales or Scotland begin to talk about sharing a common office space, a common administrative staff, and certain pastoral functions across all the old lines, some form of accommodation is definitely under way.

Part of twenty-first-century accommodation is, without doubt, a judicious pooling of resources in a time when declining censuses and shrinking coffers demand extraordinary measures; but to be too cynical or too fiscal in one’s interpretation is to miss an underlying reality: The lines of division, once defended to the point of physical death or, more often, to the extreme of a believer’s economic ruin, are not so taut of definition as once they were; and the energy those lines once commanded is now directed toward something larger than the separations they still rhetorically represent.

To interpret such current changes too pragmatically would also be to miss the smaller truths that, when the dust of the next fifty years dies down, will be the ones that turn out to have mattered the most. For example, in this country, by the turn of the millennium, two out of every five Christians who attended services regularly were actively attending them each week in two or more different churches or parishes or communions. If one can believe the sociologists who describe such patterns, there is no loss in this of self-identity, only a broadening of loyalties. That is to say, the Christians who belong in

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